If you are looking to know more about the insides of databases (relational algebra, relational design theory, etc.) or machine learning or AI you may want to check out these free online classes from Stanford University. Class begins October 10!

It’s that time again — time to figure out what sessions you will be attending at Oracle OpenWorld 2011. In my slightly biased opinion, session by members of the OakTable Network generally have great technical content and give you the most value for your time. To aid you with your scheduling, I’ve compiled a list of sessions by OakTable members here. Enjoy!

As my loyal readers will know, I have been a big (maybe BIG) fan of the SQL Monitor Report since it’s introduction in 11g. It would not surprise me if I have looked at over 1000 SQL Monitor Reports in the past 4+ years — so I’m pretty familiar with these bad boys. Since I find them so valuable (and many customers are now upgrading to 11g), I’ve decided to do a deep dive into the SQL Monitor Report at both Oracle OpenWorld 2011 in October and the UKOUG in December. I think I have some pretty interesting and educational examples, but for anyone willing to share Active SQL Monitor Reports from their system, I thought I would extend the possibility to have it publicly discussed at either one of these sessions (or even a future blog post). Sound cool? I think so, though I may be slightly biased.

In order to participate in this once in a lifetime offer, just email the Active SQL Monitor Report file as an attachment to sqlmon@structureddata.org. If you are going to be attending my session at either OOW11 or UKOUG11, let me know so if I choose your report I’ll notify you so you can bring your friends, significant other, boss, etc. Thanks in advance!

--
-- script to create an Active SQL Monitor Report given a SQL ID
-- 11.2 and newer (EM/ACTIVE types are not in 11.1)
--
set pagesize 0 echo off timing off linesize 1000 trimspool on trim on long 2000000 longchunksize 2000000 feedback off
spool sqlmon_4vbqtp97hwqk8.html
select dbms_sqltune.report_sql_monitor(report_level=>'ALL', type=>'EM', sql_id=>'4vbqtp97hwqk8') monitor_report from dual;
spool off

The summer is flying by and in no time it will be October and that means Oracle OpenWorld 2011 should be on your radar. Once again the Oracle Real-World Performance Group will be hosting three sessions. For those unfamiliar with our presentations, you will get marketing free, no nonsense performance insight of the highest caliber from Oracle’s most elite database performance engineers — the kind of things hard core Oracle people want to hear about. Hope to see you there!

Session ID:

13641 (Wednesday Oct. 5th, 10:00)

Session Title:

Real-World Performance: The Forklift Upgrade

Session Abstract:

Today the motivation to consolidate and migrate existing data and applications into the extreme-high-performance database environments of Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic is being driven by a desire to reduce costs and deliver increased performance and service levels to users. The process is often called a forklift migration, because applications and data are simply picked up and lifted onto new platforms.In this session, Oracle’s Real World Performance group describes how best to maximize your investment and achieve world-class performance and discusses the challenges and compromises that need to be made in the process.

Session ID:

13643 (Tuesday Oct. 4th 13:15)

Session Title:

Real-World Performance: How Oracle Does It

Session Abstract:

Oracle’s Real-World Performance Group has been achieving world-class performance for clients for more than 15 years. In this session, some of the senior engineers describe the techniques, philosophy, and tools they use to address performance challenges. The session is packed with demos and examples to convey the pragmatism required in real-world performance today.

Session ID:

13640 (Thursday Oct. 6th 10:30)

Session Title:

Real-World Performance Questions and Answers

Session Abstract:

This is your chance to pose specific questions to Oracle’s Real-World Performance Group. All questions need to be in writing (yes, cards will be provided) and should relate to database performance challenges. In the past, the best questions have been related to specific topics of interest to the audience.

Over the past few weeks Oracle Mix had opened the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Suggest-a-Session to the general public where anyone could submit or vote on a session. One limitation of the Oracle Mix site was that it was impossible to sort the sessions by votes but that challenge was tackled by Roel Hartman with his blog post and APEX demo. After seeing the top session by votes, it was very interesting to me that around half of the top 15 sessions were all from the same author. That got me thinking…and that thinking turned into a little data hacking project that I embarked on. Now I admit it, I think data is very cool, and even cooler is extracting patterns and neat information from data.

Getting the Data

The Oracle Mix site is very “crawler friendly” — it has well defined code and tags which made extracting the data fairly painless. The basic process I used came down to this:

Get the listing of all the session proposals. That was done by going to the Mix main proposal page and walking all 43 pages of submissions, scraping the direct URL to each session.

Now that I had all of the session abstract URLs, grab each of those pages, all 424 of them

From each session page, extract the relevant bits: Session Name, Session Author, Total Vote Count, and most importantly, who voted for this session.

I did all of that with curl, wget and some basic regex as a “version 1″ but was hoping to go back and try it again using some more sexy technology like Beautiful Soup. That will have to be continued…

The Social Network Effect

With Oracle Mix Suggest-a-Session, people generally vote for a session for one of two reasons:

They are generally interested in the session topic

The session author asked them to vote because of their social relationship

What I think is interesting to know is just how much of the voting is done because of #2. After all, Oracle Mix is a social networking site so there certainly is some voting for that reason. In fact, one of the session authors, Yury Velikanov from Pythian, even blogged his story of rounding up votes. The data shows us this, but more on that in just a bit…

The (Unofficial) Data

I took some time to mingle around the data and found some very interesting things. Let’s just start with a few high level points:

There were 424 sessions submitted from 252 different authors.

There were 10,125 votes from 2,447 unique voters.

The number of submissions ranged from 1 to 24 per author.

Here are some interesting tidbits I extracted from the data set (apologize for not making a cool visualization chart of all this – but I’ll make up for it later):

Diving In Deeper

I could not help noticing that Tariq Farooq had the top 5 spots by total vote count. I would assert that is related to these two points:

Tariq has some very interesting and apealing sessions

Tariq has lots of friends who voted for his sessions

I have no doubt there there is some of both in the mix, but just how much influence on the votes is there from a person’s circle of friends? Or to put another way: How many voters only voted for a single session author? Or even more interesting, how many people voted for every session for a single author, and voted for no other sessions? All good questions…with answers that reside in the data!

-- number of users who voted for exactly one author
+---------------------------+
| users_voting_for_1_author |
+---------------------------+
| 828 |
+---------------------------+
-- number of voters who voted for every session by a given author
-- and total # of votes per voter is the same # as sessions by an author
+-------------------------------------------------+
| users_who_voted_for_every_session_of_an_author |
+-------------------------------------------------+
| 826 |
+-------------------------------------------------+

Wow – now that interesting! Of people only voting for a single session author, just two of them did not vote for every one of that author’s sessions. That’s community for you!

Visualizing the Voting Graph

I was very interested to see what the Mix Voting Graph looked liked, so I imported the voting data into Gephi and rendered a network graph. What I was in search of was to identify the community structure of the voting community. Gephi lets you do this by partitioning the graph into modularity classes so that the communities become visible. This process is similar to how the LinkedIn InMap breaks your professional network into different communities.

Here is what the Oracle Mix voting community looks like:

This is a great visualization of the communities and it accentuates the data from above – the voters who only voted for a single author. This can be seen by the small nodes on the outer part of the graph that have just a single edge between it and the session author’s node. Good examples of this are for Yury Velikanov and Tariq Farooq. Also clearly visible is what I’d refer to the “Pythian and friends” community centered around Alex Gorbachev and Yury Velikanov in the darker green color. There are also several other distinct communities and the color coding makes that visible.

Shouts Out

This is my first real data hacking attempt with web data and using some of the tools like Gephi for the graph analysis. One of my inspirations was Neil Kodner‘s Hadoop World 2010 Tweet Analysis, so I need to give a big shout out to Neil for that as well as his help with Gephi. Thanks Neil!

And One Last Thing

So what are people’s sessions about that were submitted? This Wordle says quite a bit.

Disclaimer

The views or opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of current or past employers. The views or opinions expressed by visitors on this blog are theirs solely and may not reflect mine.